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There are some other important differences: (1) Extended families live in a small area. There are many nieces and nephews and cousins so kids are playing in a

There are some other important differences: (1) Extended families live in a small area. There are many nieces and nephews and cousins so kids are playing in a big group of family and other neighbors, and e.g. girls start taking care of younger family members starting when they are 5 or 6 years old. (2) People work close to home, on work that is more or less comprehensible to a child, and often in groups. A group of people farming, minding sheep, weaving, washing clothes by hand, milling grain, cooking, chopping wood, making furniture, foraging for mushrooms, hunting rabbits, ... can easily get kids involved in small tasks. (3) People spend much of the day talking to each other, gossiping, cracking jokes, singing together, eating together, ... instead of reading or doing other solitary activities, spending time at remote jobs, driving around in cars, etc. But yeah we definitely shouldn’t romanticize rural poverty. Having years where nobody has enough food and all the old sick people die, commonly getting hit by disease epidemics, spending a whole life on hard menial labor and ending up with a totally wrecked body by age 50, sitting in small totally smoke-filled rooms over a wood cookfire every day (this is as bad or worse for health than the heaviest cigarette smoking), sleeping on a board or on a dirt floor with a blanket covered in fleas, needing to make your own cloth from scratch for anything, needing to carry water long distances on foot every day for all washing and drinking, .... are all pretty unpleasant. And let’s not even start on the part where rural peasants are constantly getting beat up and having stuff stolen from them (or worse) by colonial overlords, foreign corporations, local thugs, ... There’s a reason that when given the choice a large proportion of people flee rural peasant villages and move to (sometimes distant) cities, even when further exploitation awaits there.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
My mother is one of 12 kids. My father grew up on a farm, dirt poor. Your description to some degree fits my childhood. There were some really good things about growing up that way. But I was not thinking about romanticizing rural poverty. I was thinking about unfairly vilifying modern people whose choices grow out of wildly different circumstances, as if "your children should be doing more chores!" is yet one more metric to feel pressured by because two career couples trying to keep the family housed in a world where you can't afford to have a full-time parent at home really need yet one more reason to feel like failures who just aren't trying hard enough.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  > I was not thinking about romanticizing rural poverty This is why I led with “but yeah”. I am agreeing with you. > two career couples trying to keep the family housed in a world where you can't afford to have a full-time parent at home really need yet one more reason to feel like failures who just aren't trying hard enough. Living in San Francisco, we know many couples who need to keep both parents working and would love to take much more time off work to raise their kids if they could afford it, but also many couples who have plenty of extra cash and still keep both parents working and offload child-rearing to nannies or daycare or grandparents, sometimes it seems because the parents just have no idea how to interact with children or would rather stay at the office. (Maybe that’s unfair; just my anecdotal impression.) It is definitely a great luxury that I can stay home with my kid while my wife works full time. But taking care of a kid is also pretty time consuming and emotionally demanding.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Not arguing here either. Just taking the opportunity to add another detail that I felt I failed to clearly state in my original comment. I'm here to make conversation and sometimes that back and forth exchange sounds like arguing when I in no way mean it to.
- dgreensp 8y ago
  I think the article is helpful for a family in such a situation who might not otherwise think of, say, folding the laundry while hanging out with the kids and being receptive to offers of help, with the idea that down the line the kids could have the job of folding the laundry.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    The vast majority of people are raised with either a shame model or a guilt model. If there is any way for it to be interpreted as a judgy lecture that "you're doing it wrong!", most people will take it that way. If people hear it the way you hear it, that's great. But a lot of people won't hear that. They will just hear some new source of Puritan guilt and that tends to be counterproductive.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

My mother is one of 12 kids. My father grew up on a farm, dirt poor. Your description to some degree fits my childhood. There were some really good things about growing up that way. But I was not thinking about romanticizing rural poverty. I was thinking about unfairly vilifying modern people whose choices grow out of wildly different circumstances, as if "your children should be doing more chores!" is yet one more metric to feel pressured by because two career couples trying to keep the family housed in a world where you can't afford to have a full-time parent at home really need yet one more reason to feel like failures who just aren't trying hard enough.

jacobolus 8y ago
> I was not thinking about romanticizing rural poverty This is why I led with “but yeah”. I am agreeing with you. > two career couples trying to keep the family housed in a world where you can't afford to have a full-time parent at home really need yet one more reason to feel like failures who just aren't trying hard enough. Living in San Francisco, we know many couples who need to keep both parents working and would love to take much more time off work to raise their kids if they could afford it, but also many couples who have plenty of extra cash and still keep both parents working and offload child-rearing to nannies or daycare or grandparents, sometimes it seems because the parents just have no idea how to interact with children or would rather stay at the office. (Maybe that’s unfair; just my anecdotal impression.) It is definitely a great luxury that I can stay home with my kid while my wife works full time. But taking care of a kid is also pretty time consuming and emotionally demanding.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Not arguing here either. Just taking the opportunity to add another detail that I felt I failed to clearly state in my original comment. I'm here to make conversation and sometimes that back and forth exchange sounds like arguing when I in no way mean it to.
dgreensp 8y ago
I think the article is helpful for a family in such a situation who might not otherwise think of, say, folding the laundry while hanging out with the kids and being receptive to offers of help, with the idea that down the line the kids could have the job of folding the laundry.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  The vast majority of people are raised with either a shame model or a guilt model. If there is any way for it to be interpreted as a judgy lecture that "you're doing it wrong!", most people will take it that way. If people hear it the way you hear it, that's great. But a lot of people won't hear that. They will just hear some new source of Puritan guilt and that tends to be counterproductive.